COLUMN: Changes needed at the post office

Thursday

Apr 4, 2013 at 12:01 AMApr 4, 2013 at 9:51 AM

JA West

We sold our house on Moss Lake and moved into the house we built in Shelby 52 years ago. I believe that in making that move, we saved the mailman’s job in Shelby and possibly put the poor mailman who serves the lake out of a job.

When I was a boy, we seldom got any mail, but when we did, it would be a personal letter from a relative or friend. Postage for letters like that was three cents. As far as I know, the U.S.P.S. was doing okay on that three cents.

Today the internet has almost put the post office out of business—that and the cell phone. If our kids want to communicate with us, they might try by email or Gmail or cell phone, but not by post office mail.

I remember when our eldest daughter became ill. I wrote her every day, even though it took a three cent stamp on each letter. Of course, if that happened today we would keep the email hot and it wouldn’t cost anything extra.

But no one gets personal letters these days. What comes through the mail is almost unbelievable. Somewhere along the line, the post office decided to encourage advertisers to use the mail by giving them an ultra low mailing rate subsidized by increases in the price of first class mail. A letter now costs 44 cents to mail.

The post office’s decision to underwrite advertising with income from first class mail has proved disastrous. The internet just about wiped out all personal first class mail, so the post office was stuck with mostly super low rate advertisers.

So now most mail could rightly be designated as junk mail, creating an enormous and growing debt for the U.S.P.S.

And what an eclectic bunch of mail we get. We get greeting cards on special occasions and we get bills, but the bulk of our mail comes from advertisers. We get magazines we never ordered, along with subscription offers that are unbelievably low. If we order a magazine and our subscription runs out, we continue to get it even though we did not renew our subscription. I suppose that enables them to tell their advertisers that they have a big circulation so they can charge more for their ads. We get monthly reports from the companies where we put our meager savings. Many retailers seem to have one sale after another and they send us brochures and catalogues galore. We used to travel, so we get letters, brochures, and catalogues from al sorts of travel companies.

Because of our age, we get brochures and catalogues from places offering to sell us every kind of device that might make the life of an elderly person easier. We get frequent mail from AARP. Great Courses keeps offering us DVDs that would educate us on specific subjects. If we make the mistake of ordering something, we are deluged with offers from them forever after. We get constant offers for pills “that our doctors will not tell us about” that will take care of our medical problems. We give to select charities, but we get requests for donations from dozens of others. We get mail from the colleges we attended. All the wireless providers want us to change to their systems from our present ones. Every politician or would-be politician seeks our votes through the mail.

The end result of all this is that first class mail is not the cash cow it used to be, and the post office is now primarily an advertising medium inadequately funded.

The result for us personally was that our mail was so voluminous that the carrier quite often would rubber band it together. When we moved, we lightened the load for the carrier at the lake and increased the load to our Shelby carrier.

The time has come when we should make the post office an independent agency so it can take the steps needed to serve its purpose and still at least break even. Other private businesses are already competing with it, and it cannot continue to lose millions of dollars.

If that doesn’t happen in a reasonable time (and I doubt it will), I may install a trash can next to my mail box so I won’t be the middle man!